[1222] Yuck It Up

I’m having so many thoughts on the Riyadh comedy festival it’s getting in the way of me moving on to other things. 

When I’m wavering between things, sometimes I use the percentages exercise. I’m like 90% in the camp of Zach Woods, Marc Maron, David Cross and the things they’ve discussed related to fascist regimes and state sponsored violence. I’m 10% with, not even the comedians or the patent justifications and excuses they’ve offered, but with the idealized version of reality where people are just people and we want commingling and seepage that doesn’t try to paint entire societies by the atrocities of their worst actors or leadership.

 

I don’t think falsely equivocating countries is a wise or honest way to say why you’ll participate. I don’t think downplaying attacks on freedom of speech, particularly now, particularly in a country that will kill you for what you say, as a comedian, is ever going to be something people should stop giving you shit about. To me, you’ve reduced yourself to “entertainer” or “podcaster” or “influencer” and rescind the title. You’ve lost the dignity that comes with wielding the weapon of your individual voice.

 

The 10% of me is trying to embody the idea that I’m offered a huge amount of money. What’s the first line of the first excuse I would offer? I don’t owe anybody anything. My career is my own. I do, genuinely, believe we are more alike than different, even if that’s incredibly hard to discern in someone raised in a theocracy or dictatorship. How fast can you expect “progress” to be? If I’m a Jewish lesbian like Jessica Kirson, who I love as a comedian, isn’t it a monumental moment to just be there and not immediately murdered at all? So they don’t want me to make fun of religion or the royal family? Do I make fun of my colleagues who are clean and don’t touch certain subjects?

 

It’s not abstract, though, that they kill people for what they say. It’s the greatest piece of evidence you have about how important your voice is and how useful of an idiot they believe they can make you. That’s what would stop me if I felt the devil calling. That’s what would make me look at $1,000,000 or more dollars and trigger an emptiness and a closing of creative and accountable possibility. Anyone who claims it’s just a payday who’s either already solidly rich or mingling and friends with those who give them rich access, is simply not seriously engaging with their moral center. A moral center that hopefully continues to nag them.

 

I do believe the comedians who went over are also captured and insulated. They’re all, mostly, each other’s friends and apologists already. Bill has turned Jessica into a name. All the podcast bros just are on rotation on each other’s shows, touring or otherwise. Some of the comedians are hardly “comedian” anymore than they are “global brand.” When you reach those levels of success, everything takes on a more abstracted character. It’s why I tend to find arena-level comedians and shows boring even if they were, technically, the same people who made me fall in love in the first place.

 

To me, it’s pretty much a bad taste at every level of context you could apply. As individuals, I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason-not-excuse to go that doesn’t pie-in-the-sky the conversation. As a comedian, I wouldn’t invite that much scrutiny from professional shit-talkers into my life if you paid me 1.6 million dollars. As an American who is on the verge, if not already lost, freedoms, and in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel, it just feels like stupidest kind of betrayal too-indicative of the times. Thankfully, I worship nobody, so while I can be disappointed and I’m going to be significantly less inclined to pay attention to or sing the praises of anyone on that list, it’s not like my identity has been shattered. You know how many comedians who’ve brought me to tears laughing who aren’t on that list?

 

I think, reasonably enough, comedy has achieved it’s modern pedestal because people are desperate for more “truth to power” spaces. Whether or not it’s the kind of exercise that nets anything but laughs, the laughs become sacred because it feels like all you can do. I think that’s why people would imprint on anyone with the ability to articulate how they feel. But it comes at the cost of agency. Your hero let you down? You make the next joke. You learn how to meaningfully impact the thing that’s keeping you down. Save your breath trying to indefinitely shame them as they spend their money and ask yourself why you’re so keen to make it about them instead of you. You also have a microphone.

[694] Don't Know How To Hate That

Lately, I've been feeling a little lighter. I can usually only tell such things based on how many times I refrain from cursing students not showing up on time or from leaving my car horn alone. Still, I find I clench my jaw a fair to excessive amount regardless, so nothing's perfect. What's weird, I suppose, is that I'm looking forward to being broke. Like, just broke. In $80 I won't even have credit card debt. I won't be bleeding. I won't have something quite yet in works, but I'll be broke, and that will be basically okay. The last chain I adopted is $95 a month on an installment plan to keep tax assholes out of mine. I could beg for more money. I could pay that in plasma.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an “entrepreneur.” It's kind of a stupid word to me. How I've conducted my life has had exactly nothing to do with a job title or some sort of “free” or “independent” spirit and connotation. I just want what I do to manifest in as great a measure as I can make it. When I was hauling ass at my first jobs, I expected raises and promotions and free shit. People were happy to give them to me. When I was doing my homework before the first bell rang and amassing a small fortune, my first spark as to what I was truly made out of flickered on.

Recently, I've heard accounts of people who knew they were going to be on a famous stage or knew they wanted to become some arbiter of justice or peace after they encountered a hero when they were younger. It's a familiar conviction. What is it about some kids that just know something about who they are or want to be? Why do some stories look like this massive build up of compounding forces until the inevitable finally clicks?

I've also been reading about how randomness effects whether or not people as “talented” or “smart” or “motivated” and “gritty” manage to get anywhere in life. The role that luck has to play is not inconsequential. Born with more money and better contacts? Get a “small million dollar loan?” For me, I had to wake up to the reality of my situation pretty quickly. I have support, but not fail spectacularly and bankrupt everyone around me kind of leeway. As time goes on and people grow comfortable or more precarious, there is no few grand hiding just around the corner to fix a big issue.

So then I think about my lifestyle. I take care of my shit. I live within my means. I guilt trip myself over indulges. I had an older acquaintance tell me that I should take more time to stop and smell the roses. I explained to him that I've already lead a perfectly self-indulgent life, and I could bother to be steeped in meaningful work more often. My concept of what that looks like has changed considerably over the years.

The biggest bit though is how I look with all of my built up potential hanging out in my field. Everything I do I try to treat as a down payment or investment. Money spends easy. Building something that generates it and enthusiasm is considerably harder than anyone bothers to cope with. It's why I hate forums and attempting to reach out. You learn extremely quickly that, well, at this point, literally no one will even take a hand out of the chance to buy into property. I try to wrap my head around what I'd be filled with if I stumbled across a post where someone said, “Here's my field, what can we build in it? You get your half, I get mine.”

When this kind of shit happens, where I'm made to feel, not just “different,” but like out and out wrong or perfectly backwards and annoying for going about things the way I do, I start to mythologize myself. Like, surely, I can't be the only one! I have so many examples of people doing what I want to do well. I didn't conjure this shit from the ether. And what part of any money-making endeavor, particularly if you didn't come from money, is supposed to be easy? No one talks about the last minute trips hauling supplies in the middle of the freezing night on your ill-suited car so you can help get something complete on a time crunch. And maybe while you're doing it, you come back covered in ticks, and you dropped a board on your foot, or shit car decided to die on the ride back. That's what “entrepreneurship” means to me. You do what needs to be done, now. You take it in stride. You ask for as much failure as quick as possible for as little money as you can make it cost you, learn, change, and try again. I'm not “gambling,” I'm barely “speculating,” and I'm not taking any more or less risk than I would with my life as it's managed to look so far.

The “failure” of the things I do comes to mind at this point. You know what a “failed” coffee van venture is? A great work van with a generator and equipment to work with whenever the time comes. The “failed” coffee shop was proof of concept for even shitty business, and a shit ton of supplies that don't just disappear. You know what happens when you buy land and build on it? The value increases dramatically. You know how you live comfortably when you're old so you don't end up working until you're 70 after your pension got wiped out and now you're waxing your poorly conceived business ideas to the enthusiastic “kid" at the bar? You start now. You invest now. You try and fail and work right fucking now. You accept that you're already dead, and your only shot at heaven is this life. If you can do better, do better. Be better. Fix the obvious, then fix the subtle, then double down on the exact right thing you should be doing to get the best out of yourself every chance you get. To the best of your ability and understanding is what you owe yourself. Anything less is death.

What else in life offers that kind of perpetual effort for self improvement? I saw a post on facebook about a famous pianist getting asked why they still practiced at 90. They said, “I think I'm getting better” or something similar. Do people feel that in their day to day lives? Are you practicing and improving and learning something new with your job? It's great if you are, I just have never managed to figure out how to feel the same way about anything I've ever been employed to do. There's usually “the way we do things” which, try as you might, there's usually pretty severe consequences for pushing against too hard.

As I'm rounding 2^nd base on my way to 30, I'm wondering, what's the alternative? If I wasn't navigating the things I am now in service to my desire to own and create with relative freedom and abandon, how else could I have gone about it? No “real job” has provided me the kind of mental security or self-respect to think something as drastic as, “I can totally do this, just for these (x) amount of years, and then my real life begins!” Like, at least I'm killing 2 or 3 birds with one stone in marathoning TV, books and podcasts, and drumming when I do ClusterTruck. It's basically just the thing that interrupts my otherwise attempting to be occupied attention.

A weird hard part about going about things the way I do is the endless waves of bullshit enthusiasm. I don't mean from people who've been following along or friends I know who are up to their own important things. I mean if I post some Maron-esc rant describing the kind of partner or help I need, and then 2 idiots chime in with how cool and motivating I am. Am I? Motivating? You read my story, my begging appeal from my knees, and your take away was 5 empty lines about your new motivation? Don't talk to me about your dreams, work on them. Incorporate them into what I'm doing. Stop wasting our time.

Here too I think about if differences in people just become more pronounced over time, or if they were already huge and there to begin with, but each either succumbs to their particular life forces or not. I could be 5 roommates deep, gaming all day, working IT for IU, have a car payment, and resolved myself to the excessively-average girl in the office after I watch the carnage between the rest of the pack failing with her. That's something I could've done. I could have screamed “fuck it” and went buck wild with my land cash and traveled or gambled or bought something showy under the deep understanding that “you only live once.” I could have catfished lonely OKCupid girls with dyed hair and nose rings into thinking I was deep and super nice and then moved us towards some kind of family unit. Try to be “normal” and “resolved.” It's in trying to imagine myself doing anything else that I start to question “free will.” I literally don't know how else I can be for it to seem even remotely “correct.” When I actually get back to practicing music every day, lose 30 pounds, and find where I left my half-inch of hairline, I'll be like 90% of my best self. It's presumed philanthropy and political engagement that might round out the last 10%. My honest desire and pursuit does most of the work for me already.

My ongoing freak-out concern about time notwithstanding, I have 1 month out of the year I need to work to live as well or better than I have lived since getting out of college. There's no gun to my head that says I need to spend $1800 RIGHT NOW to fix the moving truck. More than half of my yearly bills aren't even due until the fall, or don't necessarily need to be hooked up in the first place. It's just by definition lighter. I've erased variables that work to clench my jaw. I've consolidated the big mess of expenses into a story about number of days and hours, and how I'm going to corrupt those days to fit my agenda even if I'm forced to work in service to someone else's. I don't know how to hate that.

Here seems an important point. How often do I talk about things I hate? My driving force is about moving to a place where I'm as befuddled as I could possibly be in trying to regard my circumstances as anything more than impossible to hate. That's the voice in the back of my head. That's what sees me through drama and broken relationships. People won't talk or help? You can't find a reason to hate ones that will. Want to complain about your job or future prospects? Better get to creating in all this empty space you gave yourself. Better use your former rent money to promote and build. Tired of being surrounded by idiots? I suppose a desert would be more remote, but no one's going to bother you there. I can still find plenty to hate about my circumstances for sure, but it is possible for it to fall away. I can subject myself to a different environment that hopefully breeds the best kind of me. And since no one cares to build it for me, and I can't change for the better without doing so, nothing really matters that doesn't speak to that. Smell the roses? Help me learn how to grow them, and I'll smell the hell out of our effort.